Meet the co-founder of SurePay
David-Jan Janse, Co-Founder and CEO of SurePay, is a seasoned business strategist with over 25 years of experience in business transformation and lean startup thinking leading to new value propositions. He loves to spot new business models based on innovation and customer behaviour. In 2016, David-Jan Janse and Marcel Rienties founded SurePay, the market leader in Confirmation of Payee (CoP).
There’s always a lightbulb moment before the beginning of a new venture. What was that moment for you?
While still at Rabobank Group, a company where I was working since the 90s, Marcel Rienties and I went to the local train station and interviewed tonnes of people about online banking, and what hurdles, if any, they were experiencing. The message was clear; payment fraud prevention.
Payments across Europe were becoming increasingly digitised, yet there were no new, innovative solutions to combat fraudsters and protect businesses and consumers.
It wasn’t long until we invented the IBAN-Name Check, which now covers nearly 100% of all digital transactions in the Netherlands.
What is your day-to-day role with the company?
Marcel and I once did everything at SurePay ourselves, but I now have an incredible team to work with. Today, I'm focused on managing the company and building the organisation, which has been my role for several years now. Despite this, I often mirror the manager role; walking around and having conversations with the team to understand how people are interacting with each other and how I can help overcome any challenges.
What’s the most common problem your customers approach you with?
Authorised Push Payment (APP) scams cost customers millions every year. APP fraud happens when fraudsters deceive consumers or individuals at a business to send them a payment under false pretences to a bank account controlled by the fraudster. We saw a 71% increase in APP fraud during the first half of 2021 and, for the first time, the amount of money stolen through APP fraud overtook card fraud losses, according to UK Finance.
Confirmation of Payee (CoP), how the IBAN-Name Check is known in the UK, is the perfect solution to combat APP fraud by giving customers greater assurance that they are sending payments to the intended recipient.
What inspired you to launch your business and what is the end goal?
What inspired us to launch SurePay was simple from the beginning - we wanted to eradicate misdirected payments either because of fraud or simply the innocent entering of erroneous information. Through our CoP service, an innovative, real-time name-checking solution that gives payers greater assurance that their payments are going to the intended recipient, we are drastically improving the ease of use and security of online payments for both consumers and businesses. Our end goal is to ultimately be ingrained in the payment journey; connecting our CoP service to the rest of the world so that digital payments are more secure.
How do you set yourself apart from other businesses in your industry?
What sets SurePay apart from other businesses in the x After four years of improving our algorithm, tweaking, and improving the service, we now offer the highest match percentage on the market, at 77%, and the lowest no match results, at 5%, therefore, providing the most comprehensive checks without interfering with the customer journey.
With all the success stories around entrepreneurship and how innovative people have to be to take the leap. How do you think you’ve innovated your sector and why?
We are the investors of the IBAN Name Check in the Netherlands, a market that we now virtually cover in its entirety. Our success in the Dutch market has also seen launch in the UK, where we cover more than 30% of all digital transactions through our partnership with banks like NatWest, Triodos and Atom Bank.
Prior to this innovation, payments were processed using the sort code and account number only, meaning that the bank did not check whether the payee and the bank account matched. This flaw led to criminals posing as trusted organisations, such as banks or solicitors, who then tricked them into making authorised payments (APP scams) with no warning from the bank if the details did not belong to the business they were expecting to pay.
Since going live with our solution, we have checked nearly 4.5 billion transactions, leading to an 81% reduction in invoice fraud, 90% fewer onboarding failures and a 67% drop in misdirected payments.
What plans do you have for SurePay over the next two years?
Surepay’s CoP algorithm is already exceptionally strong, combining cutting-edge data science techniques with profound knowledge of transactions and payee’s behaviour, however, we want to continue to improve it, as well as deliver new products and services over the next few years. In the UK, the expectation is that by the end of 2022, the adoption of CoP will be widespread with its protections offered across the vast majority of UK payment journeys; we want to help make this happen. But also, we want to continue to grow and expand across Europe, having recently launched across the Benelux region and Germany.
Any new product launches we should know about?
We have recently launched the first-ever cross-border CoP solution with SEPAMail.eu and StreamMind, allowing companies and banks to check payments between France and the Netherlands. This partnership found that our cross-border CoP solution can also help reduce friction in payment journeys and related customer enquiries, which means more efficient payments and lower costs. This is something we’re looking to explore further in the coming months.
In September last year, we raised a €12.2 million round led by Connected Capital with Iris Capital, joining Rabo Frontier Ventures. The funding is being used towards scaling our technology platform and developing new customer solutions. The plan is to launch bulk payments-related products and expand SurePay PayID, a Pay Your Contacts solution, to better protect our customers from payments fraud.
And we continue to expand across the continent, having just announced our first hire in the Nordics. This marks a real milestone for SurePay, as we continue our efforts into eradicating fraudulent and misdirected payments by making our solution available more widely across Europe.
How do you believe the evolution of tech will affect your industry over the next 10 years?
The payment industry is in the midst of a significant transformation, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic which had a massive impact on how consumers make payments, forcing the environment to digitise faster than anticipated. Online fraudsters managed to capitalise on the pandemic; taking advantage of the increase in online activity by impersonating delivery companies, sending fake texts about Covid-19 vaccines and lockdown fines, to name a few. Technology needs to constantly evolve in order to combat these fraudsters; new payment solutions and technology are needed to protect businesses and consumers in this increasingly digitised and vulnerable space.
What advice would you give to early-stage founders wanting to harness the power of technology to create a positive impact?
To make a positive impact, early-stage founders should be driven by purpose - find a cause that you care about and solve a problem. And equally, it’s important to know that you can’t take on the whole world at once. At SurePay, we’re not trying to eradicate fraud overnight - our ambition is to make sure that bank transfers are much, much safer. And we’re incredibly efficient at that.
